• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Yes, my net worth went down.

    The point of “you don’t lose money until you sell” is to discourage panic selling, but it’s total bunk. When you assets lose value, you do lose money, and how much that matters depends on when you need to access that money. As the article says, you may not care that you lost money if you don’t need to access the money, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now poorer if your assets drop in value.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      That is basically Schrodinger’s cat. If you don’t open the box, the cat is both dead or alive. So you “could” interpret “lost money” as lost net worth. But if you read it litterally, it wasn’t money. It was an asset. You couldn’t spend it and it doesn’t meet the definition of money. Poorer, I suppose, because you could borrow against that asset, but not as much as before.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        3 hours ago

        That is basically Schrodinger’s cat

        No, it’s not.

        Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is about things where observing state will impact the state. That would maybe apply if we’re talking about something unique, like an ungraded collectible or one of a kind item (maybe Trump’s beard clippings?) where it cannot have a value until it is either graded or sold.

        Stocks have real-time valuations, and trades can happen in near real time. There’s no box for the cat to be in, it’s always observable.

        money

        Look up the definition. Here’s the second usage from Webster:

        2 a: wealth reckoned in terms of money

        And the legal definition, further down on the same page:

        2 a: assets or compensation in the form of or readily convertible into cash

        Stocks are absolutely readily convertible to cash, and I argue that less liquid investments like RE are as well (esp with those cash offer places). Basically, if there’s a market price for it and you can reasonably get that price, it counts.

        When my stocks go down, I may not have realized that loss yet from a tax perspective, but the amount of money I can readily convert to cash is reduced.